Same lunch thing over here. I do enjoy meeting my team for lunch. But it's not any easier for me to get work done in the office and the theoretical face to face collaboration doesn't quite seem to happen. We've offices in a bunch of countries anyways and are pretty distributed in my project.
I'm an engineering manager and some of my fellow managers seem to feel very strongly about wanting people to come to the office despite 2+ years of evidence that we can work remotely. It's tough because everyone is different. Some people might benefit from the ritual of coming into the office, the additional social connections, and to some degree the peer pressure. Some people are very effective working from home. Some people live close by, some people live far away.
We have a lot of space in our offices and lots of meeting rooms so no real noise issues or feeling cramped. If I had my own space with a door and a 5 minute commute then I'd probably go more often but I have neither...
Hard to say where we go from here. I do think having the team in physical proximity has advantages for collaboration. But the other pieces to take advantage of that have to be in place as well. I've done some of my best work while working physically closing with others but I've also had some of the worst distraction heavy environments where I got little done. As long as companies are just optimizing for cost per employee then maybe they should just sell their office buildings...
I'm an engineering manager and some of my fellow managers seem to feel very strongly about wanting people to come to the office despite 2+ years of evidence that we can work remotely. It's tough because everyone is different. Some people might benefit from the ritual of coming into the office, the additional social connections, and to some degree the peer pressure. Some people are very effective working from home. Some people live close by, some people live far away.
We have a lot of space in our offices and lots of meeting rooms so no real noise issues or feeling cramped. If I had my own space with a door and a 5 minute commute then I'd probably go more often but I have neither...
Hard to say where we go from here. I do think having the team in physical proximity has advantages for collaboration. But the other pieces to take advantage of that have to be in place as well. I've done some of my best work while working physically closing with others but I've also had some of the worst distraction heavy environments where I got little done. As long as companies are just optimizing for cost per employee then maybe they should just sell their office buildings...